The fall sitting of the Legislative Assembly of PEI opened this afternoon, and I happened to be walking through the neighbourhood during the opening ceremonies on Great George Street.

Just as I was walking by, the band struck up and played the theme song from The Friendly Giant, which I thought an odd, albeit poignant, music choice.

It turns out that, beyond the confines of The Friendly Giant, this song has a broader life as Early One Morning:

“Early One Morning” is an English folk song with lyrics first found in publications as far back as 1787.  A broadside ballad sheet in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, dated between 1828 and 1829 has the title “The Lamenting Maid” and refers to the lover leaving to become a sailor.

Nonetheless, I prefer to keep the image of Friendly, reaching his hands down into the floor of the legislative chamber to arrange the chairs and the mace, in my head. That’s how the sitting should start.

Here we are inside. Here’s one little chair for one of you, and a bigger chair for two of you to curl up in. And for someone, who likes to rock, a rocking chair, in the middle. Now look up… waaay up…

There’s a new version of Firefox out today, code-named Quantum, that will knock your socks off.

In recent years remaining a Firefox user has required a compromise: sacrificing performance and features for the knowledge that you’re supporting an open browser.

That stops today: the new version is properly zippy and feature rich, and yet still Firefox. No more compromise needed.

No idea how to install Firefox? Let me know, and I’ll come install it for you.

Sometimes at the grocery store checkout, on all too rare occasions, customer and checkout clerk achieve an uncanny level of synchronization, to the point where the experience transcends mere checkout and becomes ballet.

It takes both a special clerk with exceptional organizational and perceptual skills, the right mix of groceries in the cart, and an unexpected gust of Gilbrethian economy.

Tonight was a night like that.

Sobeys Allen Street. Aisle 8. Clerk Kaitlyn at the helm; $178 of groceries in the cart.

Everything unfurled without a single hiccup: as soon as I placed items on the conveyor they were whisked into precision placement in one of my reusable bags. I could hardly keep up.

And then, before I knew what was happening, we were done.

I fumbled my Air Miles and credit cards out of my wallet. Scan. Swipe. Tap.

And I was off into the crisp autumn evening.

The joys of shopping list by dictation.

Over the 18 years that I’ve been writing in this space, I’ve written 7,779 posts.

In those posts I’ve included 24,765 links to other websites; there was, indeed, a link in the very first post, to http://www.digisle.net/.

What that link has in common with a lot of other links I’ve added over the years is that it’s a broken one: that web address, which was once a link to the Hawaii-based Digital Island, is a dead one, and leads nowhere.

When a web browser requests a page from a web server, a number of things can happen: the server can report back “here you go!”, “you don’t have access to that,” or “that page no longer exists,” or “that page has moved.”

To see what had happened over the years to the pages I’d linked to from my posts, I ran the 24,765 links through a link checker, a simple command line script adapted from here, that looks like this:

xargs -n1 -P 50 curl -o /dev/null --silent --head --write-out '%{url_effective}: %{http_code}\n' < ruk-dot-ca-links.csv > stats.log

The result was a file called stats.log with one line per link and the status code that the web server returned when the script went looking for it.

Here’s a summary of what it found:

In plain language this means that:

• Half of the pages I linked to are still there, at the same address, and work as they always have.
• One third of the pages I linked to are now redirected to other addresses; sometimes this means the links still work, just with a changed address, sometimes this means the links are broken and simply redirects to the front of a website or elsewhere.
• One fifth of the pages I linked to aren’t there anymore at all, either because the server that once served them has gone offline, or because the server’s still there, but is returning an error.

Visually, this looks like this:

That half of the links are still there, at the same address, after 18 years of writing is a better result than I expected; I’d assumed that more of the web had fallen off than that.

Still, though, it’s sad that at least 20% of the pages I’ve linked to cannot be accessed directly any more. Some of those may have ended up in the Wayback Machine, others are simply lost to time.

Oliver and I go to Starbucks for a break between school and a vet visit.

Clerk: If you make that cappuccino a Christmas drink, you can get it for free.

Me: Like what?

Clerk: How about a Holiday Spice Flat White?

Me: Can I have that, but without the holiday spice?

The clerk smiles: we’ve entered into a conspiracy together. He spends a frustrated minute trying to make this happen.

Clerk: I’m afraid I can’t make the till do that.

Foiled by technology.

I expect that if it weren’t “buy one holiday drink, get another one free” day, with the resulting deluge of customers, he might have been able to nudge-nudge, wink-wink this to the colleague standing 5 feet from him who was about to be charged with the conjuring of my drink.

But not today.

I grew up in Ontario eating three meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Catherine also grew up in Ontario eating three meals a day, but hers were breakfast, dinner and supper. In Catherine’s world a lunch was something you had after a Junior Farmers dance or a funeral.

Here on Prince Edward Island the midday meal is know by both lunch and dinner; here in town, at least, “let’s grab lunch” will be commonly understood to mean “let us share a midday meal together,” and not “let us get together after a funeral.”

But as you radiate out from town, “will you be home for dinner” is more likely to mean “will you be home at noon” and not “will you be home at 6.”

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital menu for patients comes down solidly on the side of dinner for the midday meal. Catherine had some minor surgery this week, and this is the menu left in her room for her to make choices from yesterday morning:

I have never, in all my 51 years, spent an overnight in a hospital, and so I’ve never, in all my 51 years, been subject to hospital meals. Being as close to a vegetarian as one can be without formally declaring, I’m daunted by the prospect of having to do so in the future: as you can see from the choices offered to Catherine yesterday, vegetarian-friendly options aren’t on offer on the default menu (I assume that, if special arrangements were made in advance, this could be worked around; at least I hope so).

Daniel Stenberg created curl, the utility you’ve probably never heard of that, under the hood, is an invaluable part of how the Internet works.

As he described with humility and good humour here, Stenberg was awarded the Polhem Prize for this work.

Beyond the deserved recognition, perhaps the greatest result of the prize is this video wherein he describes what curl is, and how open source works.

Welcome to another episode of “Pete tries to keep his 2000 VW Jetta on the road until 2020.”

Before getting to the relevant plot points, as an aside let me point out that when I was 17 years old, in 1983, the notion that my parents would be driving around a 17 year old car from 1966 would have been absurd. So, go car industry and your making cars that last longer!

I took the Jetta into Dave’s Service Centre yesterday for an early pass at the annual motor vehicle inspection (the current inspection doesn’t expire until December 31); I knew I had some bulbs out, and I thought I might as well kill several birds with one stone.

In addition to the bulbs, it turns out that I need (a) a new catalytic convertor and (b) a new power steering pressure hose and (c) new rear rotors.

The catalytic converter was an expected issue: Dave’s been nursing it along with a weld here and a weld there for several years, but it’s time. Fortunately Mufflercentre has a relatively inexpensive solution for that.

The rear rotors were also expected: I had the front ones done earlier this year, and so it was time for them too.

The power steering pressure hose is another matter, however: a locally-sourced part is about $300. Dorothy at Dave’s suggested that, what with me being computer savvy, I might be able to find a cheaper part online and, as it happens, I did: eBay had a Sunsong North America 3402061 Power Steering Pressure Hose that cost me $US 108, shipping included. It’s winging its way here for delivery next week.

The road to 2020 continues.

In a sure sign that the Canada 150 hoopla is drawing to a close, the large 1867 numbers that have been sitting on the Confederation Centre plaza since the spring were loaded on a flatbed truck this morning to go on to their next assignment.

They were, disconcertingly for someone with my eyes, loaded on the truck in 1678 order, but perhaps this is because they’re being shipped to Padua for the Elena Cornaro Piscopia 340 celebrations.